This invention relates to a drill string element handling apparatus of a drill machine mounted on a crawler vehicle. The drill string element as used herein includes a drill rod, drill pipe and the like and a series of connected drill string elements are called a drill string.
It has so far been necessary to extend successively drill rods or extension rods of the crawler-vehicle mounted drill as drilling operation proceeds. Therefore, in the vicinity of the guide member of a crawler-vehicle mounted drill there is installed a drill rod handling apparatus which supplies drill rods successively from its magazine to a drill string, and upon completion of the drilling operation the drill rods separated from the drill string are in turn accommodated in the magazine. Further, in the above-mentioned drill rod handling apparatus, there has heretofore been employed a method of supplying the drill rods previously accommodated in a magazine into the drill rod handling apparatus by means of a turning arm. However, this method has been disadvantageous in that because the construction of the magazine and the turning arm arragement is complicated and their weight is heavy and because the magazine projects outside the guide member considerably the guide member itself must be constructed in a large-sized and robust structure.